World War I Centennial: Balkan Bedlam Beckons

The First World War was an unprecedented catastrophe that killed millions and set the continent of Europe on the path to further calamity two decades later. But it didn’t come out of nowhere.

With the centennial of the outbreak of hostilities coming up in 2014, Erik Sass will be looking back at the lead-up to the war, when seemingly minor moments of friction accumulated until the situation was ready to explode. He'll be covering those events 100 years after they occurred. This is the 17th installment in the series. (See all entries here.)

May 12, 1912: Balkan Bedlam Beckons

While the world focused on Italy’s war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, an even bigger conflict was brewing in the Balkans, where an international conspiracy against the beleaguered Turks was coming together in the form of the Balkan League. The first step had been taken in March 1912, when Bulgaria and Serbia signed a defensive pact with a secret protocol dividing up the Turkish territory of Macedonia. On May 12, 1912, another Balkan country joined the conspiracy, with the signing of a secret pact between Bulgaria and Greece.

In their “Treaty of Alliance and Defense,” Bulgaria and Greece vowed “not to give this agreement, which is purely one of defense, an aggressive tendency in any way whatsoever,” promising only to assist each other if either party were attacked by the Ottoman Empire. But like the alliance between Serbia and Bulgaria, the partnership between Greece and Bulgaria ended up having little to do with defense and a lot more to do with grabbing territory from the hated Turks: the defensive alliance was just a prelude. In September it would be joined by a secret military convention that committed Greece to provide 120,000 troops and Bulgaria 300,000 troops to a joint war against Turkey. Meanwhile the Greek navy would run interception against the Turkish fleet in the Aegean Sea, thus blocking the Turks from bringing reinforcements to the Balkans from Asia Minor and the Middle East.

Also on May 12, 1912, Bulgaria and Serbia signed a military convention in which both powers agreed to provide at least 200,000 troops (each) to a war with the Ottoman Empire. The military convention would be followed later that month by an agreement between the Bulgarian and Serbian General Staffs, in which they set out detailed plans for the attack on the Ottoman Empire. At the center of the plans was a joint attack forming a pincer movement on Skopje, the capital of Turkish Macedonia; at the same time the Serbians would advance on Turkish territory along the Adriatic Sea in Albania, and the Bulgarians would seize Turkish territory along the Aegean Sea in Thrace. Separately, Bulgaria and Greece later agreed that the Greeks would seize Epirus and possibly some parts of southern Macedonia. The key city of Salonika would be occupied by either the Bulgarians or Greeks – both sides hoped to grab it for themselves.

Indeed, while all the conspirators were eager to carve up Turkish territory in the Balkans, trouble was brewing over the division of the spoils, as Bulgaria and Serbia had never agreed on precise borders for their spheres of interest in Macedonia. To move things along, they sidestepped this issue by agreeing to appoint Russia’s Czar Nicholas II as mediator for their dispute. As the most powerful Slavic state, Russia appeared to be a natural choice to arbitrate conflicts between the smaller Slavic states, but the Russian autocrat would fulfill this responsibility only reluctantly, since it meant he would probably have to alienate one of his two client states in the Balkans. The result was a confused muddle that pushed the Balkan Peninsula -- and Europe -- closer to renewed conflict on a much greater scale in 1914.

Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 301st installment in the series. Read an overview of the war to date here.

In addition to the momentous events that finished the First World War, the year 1918 brought one of the most remarkable periods of diplomacy and international politics in American history, as President Woodrow Wilson sought to reshape the world based on the national ideals of democracy and self-determination. The effort reflected Wilson’s belief in American exceptionalism, meaning a special character derived from the United States’ democratic traditions, which gave the American people a historic mission to spread liberty, justice, and the rule of law to the rest of the world.

This sweeping attempt to remake the world based on political and philosophical ideals, though ultimately unsuccessful, wasn’t quite as impractical as it might seem. As Europe destroyed itself in a paroxysm of violence, the United States of America—already the world’s largest economy before the war even began—gathered unprecedented power over the affairs of other nations. U.S. lending to the Allies rose from $2.25 billion in 1917 to $7 billion by the end of 1918, giving Wilson the “whip hand” in negotiations with his European colleagues (in fact, a large portion of these loans were spent on American war supplies, spurring America’s wartime economic boom). France and Britain also imported huge amounts of American grain, meat, butter, and other foodstuffs to ward off starvation, and coal and oil for heat in the winter.

Erik Sass

Erik Sass

Meanwhile British and French investors were forced by their governments to sell off foreign assets to raise dollars for war purchases, and American investors swooped in to buy up undervalued assets, giving the U.S. even more financial leverage globally: as the total stock of British foreign direct investment around the world fell from £4.26 billion in 1914 to £3.1 billion in 1918, and French FDI fell from 45 billion to 30 billion francs over the same period, American FDI soared from $3.5 billion to $13.7 billion.

Most important was America’s critical contribution in manpower and war production, which finally broke the stasis on the Western Front in the summer of 1918. By the end of the war there were 2 million American soldiers in Europe plus almost 2 million more back home ready for deployment. In the desperate days of June 1918, General of the Armies John “Black Jack” Pershing joined the Allied prime ministers in requesting that the American Expeditionary Force be expanded to 100 divisions, with 80 to be in France by April 1919; the U.S. Army had grown to 62 divisions by the time the war ended in November 1918, including 43 in France.

In this context it was widely hoped that Wilson would use America’s newfound power to dictate a just peace in Europe, and the idealistic president felt summoned to this sacred duty, even if it meant conflict with Britain and France. (Wilson insisted that America was an “Associated,” not “Allied,” power, to highlight America’s freedom from any obligation to respect the Allies’ postwar plans for Europe and the world.)

On January 8, 1918 Wilson outlined a new world order in the “Fourteen Points,” calling for the immediate evacuation of Belgium, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro by the Central Powers; the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, liberating their oppressed nationalities; the creation of Poland; the return of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany to France; open diplomacy and an end to secret treaties; free trade; arms control agreements; and the formation of an international organization to enforce the rules, later called the League of Nations.

With these specific issues addressed, Wilson moved on to broad ideals in a speech to Congress on February 11, 1918, setting forth some steering ideals for his postwar vision in the “Four Principles.” First, all territorial adjustments to the map of Europe should be made solely “to bring a peace that will be permanent.” Second, the peacemakers had to respect the rights of small nations and regions: “Peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty.” Third, the interests of local populations trumped those of the Great Powers: “Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst rival states.” Fourth, all smaller groups aspiring to nationhood should receive sanction, as long as their goals don’t stir “discord and antagonism” in conflict with other groups.

The Four Principles were broad enough to permit a range of interpretations. Once again officials on both sides of the European conflict were afraid to openly differ from Wilson’s vision, yet accused their enemies of paying Wilson lip service. In a speech on February 25, 1918, the German chancellor, Georg von Hertling, claimed to agree with Wilson’s proposals in the Fourteen Points and Four Principles, but added that Germany had to have security guarantees from Belgium before evacuating the country and also accused the Entente Powers of violating Wilson’s rules. In response British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour blasted German hypocrisy and reiterated the Allied demand that Germany evacuate Belgium before peace negotiations could begin, pointing out that this injustice was the cause of the whole war.

Both sides could agree to the Four Principles in part because they were so vague, but also because they hoped to use them for their own ends. For example, in Eastern Europe the Germans still calculated that supporting the cause of national self-determination would allow them to dominate newly independent states in the Baltic, Poland, and Ukraine, eventually forming a regional trade bloc under German leadership. For their part Britain and France were happy to cancel promises of territory around the Adriatic Sea to Italy on the grounds of self-determination for local Slavic populations. They also clearly intended to disregard Wilson’s ideals, for example with their division of the Ottoman Empire’s old territories in the Middle East in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Finally, Wilson’s guidelines simply couldn’t reconcile conflicting claims between a jumble of old and new nations in Eastern Europe: On the heels of the First World War the region saw a new round of violence with wars between combinations of Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Czech Republic.

BROADWAY CLOSES

As the president put forth his vision for a new world order, at home Americans faced growing wartime shortages as well rising prices due to inflation. In one coldly symbolic development, on February 12, 1918 the theaters of Broadway were temporarily closed to conserve coal for the war effort. Most of the theaters remained closed through cold winter months, shutting down the vital heart of New York City around Times Square, although they reopened in the spring.

The heating fuel shortage was real enough, compounding hunger among the urban poor. In January 1918 Philadelphia had suffered a “coal famine,” prompting one widow to tell the Philadelphia Inquirer: “We’re almost starving, my babies and me. It’s all right to almost starve. We’re pretty near used to that, but we can’t freeze. I could, but my babies can’t.”

Erik Sass

Across the U.S. and Europe, shortages and rising prices triggered a wave of industrial unrest in the latter years of the war, as complaints about low wages and high prices flowed together with demands for political reform. In Britain the number of strikes per year rose from 532 incidents involving 276,000 workers in 1916, to 1165 incidents involving 1.1 million strikers in 1918. In Germany the number of strikes rose from 137 in 1915 to 772 in 1918, as the number of workers involved soared from 11,639 to 1.3 million. Amid growing privation and suffering on the home front, the sinews of the war economy were beginning to snap.

Erik Sass is covering the events of the war exactly 100 years after they happened. This is the 300th installment in the series. Read an overview of the war to date here.

The First World War triggered a wave of political reform, as country after country gave women the vote in recognition of their manycontributions to the war effort, including working in war industries, serving as nurses and ambulance drivers, and running businesses and public services. There were other arguments besides: some pundits said that women, naturally inclined to pacifism, would exert a moderating influence over male politics. Others worried women would refuse to bear a new generation of children, needed to make good the loss of millions of lives in the war, unless they got the vote.

One month after the U.S. House of Representatives approved the 18th Amendment giving women the vote (later rejected by the Senate until 1920), on February 6, 1918, Britain’s Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, also known as the Fourth Reform Act, granting women householders and university graduates ages 30 and over the right to vote, as well as universal male suffrage. The law added 8.4 million women and 5.6 million men to the franchise nationally, although women would remain outnumbered in the British electorate until full female suffrage was granted in 1928.

Although activists had been pursuing women’s suffrage for decades in Britain, there were no huge public celebrations following Parliament’s historic vote, due partly to the grim wartime context—but also because many had long taken the outcome for granted. The arrival of women’s suffrage was something of an anticlimax, following the revolution in gender relations brought about by the war.

WOMEN'S WAR, WOMEN'S WORLDS

Across Europe and much of the world, war brought women new freedoms in other spheres, but also new pressures and concerns. In addition to war work, women were expected to continue serving in their traditional roles as homemakers and caregivers, leaving them torn between work and family, a still-familiar dilemma. For women working in the war zone, this meant the constant threat of being forced to abandon their patriotic duties. The diarist Vera Brittain, who served as a volunteer nurses' aid for three years in France and Malta, recalled:

"Because we were women we feared perpetually that, just as our work was reaching its climax, our families would need our youth and vitality for their own support. One of my cousins, the daughter of an aunt, had already been summoned home from her canteen work in Boulogne; she was only one of many, for as the war continued to wear out strength and spirits, the middle-aged generation, having irrevocably yielded up its sons, began to lean with increasing weight upon its daughters. Thus the desperate choice between incompatible claims—by which the women of my generation, with their carefully trained consciences, have always been tormented."

For women working factory jobs “on the home front,” in addition to the tedium and dangers of such work, every day was a balancing and juggling act—especially for married women with young children. To help with the burden many factories started providing nurseries and daycare, while older children went to school. However, millions of women still had to rely on relatives, friends, religious or charitable establishments, or paid arrangements (as in the early industrial revolution, some women supported themselves running informal daycares for the children of factory workers). Female workers were also still responsible for feeding their families, which often meant waiting in long lines for basics like meat and bread. One British factory worker, Elsie McIntyre, remembered scrambling for groceries to feed her mother and siblings:

"The most awful thing was food. It was very scarce. And as we were coming off shift someone would say 'There is a bit of steak at the butchers.' And I would get off the train and then go on a tram. And can get off at Burley Road and run to the shop only to find a long queue. And by [the time] it got to my turn there would be no more meat, only half a pound of sausage, you see. And that’s coming off the night shifts. You went straight into a queue before you could go to bed."

As this account hints, just getting to and from work was often a struggle for women relying on overtaxed public transportation. One worker, Peggy Hamilton, recalled that it took 90 minutes to get to her job at a Royal Arsenal factory in London’s Woolwich Square:

“The buses were always full and when we arrived in the square it would be teeming with people fighting for a place on the bus. No one ever paid because the conductor had no chance of collecting the fares. Each bus was crowded to the suffocation point … We had to fight and push to get on board and were often ejected from several buses.”

Many factory workers came from the countryside or provincial towns, leaving low-paid domestic, agricultural, or textile work for well-paid munitions and heavy industrial work in the bigger cities, making it impractical to commute. So across Britain and Europe, factory owners and private individuals established hostels and boarding houses for young women, usually offering primitive accommodations with shared bedrooms and communal washrooms, and typically leaving girls and young women little if any privacy (and, along with factories and army barracks, providing a perfect breeding ground for communicable diseases including the flu).

MORAL ANXIETY

Reflecting the Victorian sensibilities of the older generations, parents, politicians, and clergy anxious about “loose morals” among young female factory workers demanded that towns, factories, and hostels hire female police officers, matrons, and other older women to keep an eye on female factory workers both at work and off duty. Concerns for morality and propriety covered a wide range of activity including everything from swearing and horseplay to drinking and smoking, and, of course, relations with men; members of the opposite sex were strictly forbidden in hostels and factory dormitories.

In a small concession to human nature, young women were allowed to establish “girls clubs” attached to factories and hostels where they could entertain male visitors for dances and parties in a chaste, supervised setting. But morality police had less control over young women out on the town, using their newfound spending power to visit bars, tearooms, movie theaters, and dancehalls, where it was much easier to meet members of the opposite sex including fellow factory workers and soldiers on leave. Although it is hard to generalize about the behavior of young women—most seemed determined to remain “respectable” or at least maintain that appearance—many clearly exercised their new freedom to meet, socialize, and have romantic encounters with men. Ray Strachey, a British feminist, remembered two decades later:

"It was during the war, and after it, that the changing moral standard of women became definitely noticeable. Thousands of women had seen their actual or potential mates swallowed up in that ever-increasing wave of death which was the Great War. Life was less than cheap; it was thrown away … All moral standards have been submerged … Little wonder that the old ideals of chastity and self-control in sex were, for many, also lost."

By the same token not every assignation ended in sexual intercourse. A.B. Baker, a volunteer in the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps serving in France, remembered one comparatively tame—but intense—kiss with a young soldier bound for Passchendaele:

"He said that he was afraid—more afraid than he had ever been in his life. He was sure that this time he was going to 'collect something worse than a packet.' He wanted to know what I believed about death. I forget what I told him. He made me promise to write to his mother if anything happened to him. When I promised he said that I was a “dear kid.” I was very near to crying. He asked me if he could kiss me. I said, “Yes.” He kissed me many times, and held me very tight. He held me so tight that he hurt me and frightened me. His whole body was shaking. I felt for him as I had never felt for any man before. I know now that it wasn’t love. It was just the need to comfort him a little."

Sexual morality was just one of the areas policed, rather ineffectively, by paragons from the older generations. The war also saw large numbers of women take up smoking, as tobacco was made more convenient and “feminine” with mass-produced cigarettes. Daniel Poling, an American YMCA lecturer and temperance advocate, was scandalized by the scene that greeted him in his London hotel in 1917:

"In the dining room of my hotel I found literally scores of women, perhaps as many as 300, smoking. The young, the middle-aged, and the old, were all at it. I saw a young mother calmly blow smoke over the head of her 8-year old soon, who displayed only a mild interest … For a man who is old-fashioned enough to prefer womanhood à la his wife and mother, the 'woman of the cigarette' is very disquieting, to say the least."

But for young women cigarettes came to symbolize elegance, sophistication, and worldliness, according to Brittain, who recalled her first visit home after picking up the habit:

"After supper I settled down luxuriously to smoke—a new habit originally acquired as a means of defense against the insect life of Malta—and to talk to my father about the hazards and adventures of my journey home. My parents took a gratifying pleasure in my assumption of worldly wisdom and the sophistication of the lighted cigarette; after 20 continuous months of Army service I was almost a stranger to them."

SEPARATION AND ALIENATION

War was broadly disruptive to couples, both married and unmarried, as women and men contended with long separations and uncertainty. In Britain and most other combatant nations, the marriage rate surged in the first year of the war and then plunged. Similarly, birth rates across Europe plummeted during the war, as couples put off childbearing for happier times.

Erik Sass

In addition to the ordinary obstacles presented by romantic relationships, during the war women and men also contended with a profound experiential barrier, as men tried to shield women back home from the grim reality of the trenches. Mildred Aldrich, an American retiree living in the French countryside, noted:

"One of the striking features about this war is that the active soldiers almost never talk with the civilians about the war. In a sense, it is forbidden, but the reason goes deeper than that. The soldier and the civilian seem today to speak a different language. It almost seems as if a dark curtain hung between the realities of life 'out there,' and the life into which the soldier enters en repos [on leave]."

Similar, Brittain worried that the war was creating a barrier between her and her fiancé, Roland Leighton:

"To this constant anxiety for Roland’s life was added, as the end of the fighting moved ever further into an incalculable future, a new fear that the war would come between us—as indeed, with time, the war always did, putting a barrier of indescribable experience between men and the women whom they loved, thrusting horror deeper and deeper inward … Quite early I realized this possibility of a permanent impediment to understanding."

Of course the dynamic sometimes worked the other way as well, as women who served at or near the front experienced physical danger on a regular basis, alienating them from older adults of both genders who never saw the war zone. A.B. Baker, the volunteer W.A.A.C., remembered scoffing at “spiritual advice” about the war received from a male clergy member who’d remained safely at home:

"A few days later I had a letter from our curate. In it he talked about war as a noble discipline. He said it purged men of selfishness, and by its pity and terror brought men nearer to God. I felt sick for a second time. He put with his letter a printed Prayer for Victory, and told me to say it every night. I remembered that my prayer in the dug-out had been just this, said over and over again: “O God, stop this war; stop it, and let me go home.” At home the curate had been rather a hero of mine. He wasn’t my hero any more."

The war saw a wide variety of new types of relationships forming, including casual, practical, and purely formal. Some women married men they didn’t really love out of a sense of desperation or patriotic duty, according to an American volunteer ambulance driver, William Yorke Stevenson, who heard about one situation from a French acquaintance in March 1916:

“She says a friend of hers who nursed a man, blind and without arms, is going to marry him because she thinks it is her duty, although she does not care for him. She is not pretty; but as the man is blind it will not matter, she says. Such cases are not rare.”

On the other hand, the disruptions of war weren’t always unwelcome to married women and widows, depending on their previous circumstances, which might have seen them trapped in unhappy marriages. Mildred Aldrich confided an awkward truth about the lives of French peasant women in her diary in April 1916:

"I often wonder if some of the women are not better off than in the days before the war. They do about the same work, only they are not bothered by their men … for nearly two years they have had no drinking man to come home at midnight either quarrelsome or sulky; no man’s big appetite to cook for; no man to wash for or to mend for. They have lived in absolute peace, gone to bed early to a long, unbroken sleep, and get 25 cents a day government aid, plus 10 cents for each child … under my breath, I can assure you that there is many a woman of that class a widow today who is better off for it, and so are her children."

GRIEF AND DEDICATION

Finally, women would also bear for decades the lasting burden of grief for family members killed during the war. Visitors described crowds of Parisian women dressed black in church and other public places, and some women continued to dress in mourning many years. Privately, the grieving process began with the returned possessions of the dead, as vividly described by Brittain in January 1916:

"All Roland’s things had just been sent back from the front through Cox’s; they had just opened them and they were all lying on the floor. I had no idea before of the after-results of an officer’s death, or what the returned kit, of which so much has been written in the papers, really meant. It was terrible … Everything was damp and worn and simply caked with mud … the smell of those clothes was the smell of graveyards and the dead. The mud of France which covered them was not ordinary mud; it had not the usual clean pure smell of earth, but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies."

So much importance was attached to these items that soldiers and civilians sometimes sent the possessions of dead enemy soldiers to their families on the opposing side, typically via neutral countries. Evelyn Blucher, an Englishwoman married to a German aristocrat and living in Berlin, tried to identify the possessions of British soldiers killed in battle and send them home. In August 1917 she wrote in her diary of one such occasion:

"A feeling of hopeless sadness crept over me as I saw these trays of things, the only mementoes left of men who had such a short time ago been alive in the full flush of manhood. There was a whole stack of battered and bloodstained cigarette cases, some with inscriptions or monograms engraved on them, many containing small photos or a few written words … Then there were all the other various small articles generally to be found in a man’s pocket—fountain pens, handkerchiefs, torn letters, purses, coins, etc.; and I felt the tears come into my eyes when I thought of what value they would be to some in England now."

At the same time, many women cited their own grief, as well as awareness of the losses suffered by others, as motivation for their own continuing war work. After Roland’s death Brittain wrote in her diary:

“Well, one of the things this final part of Roland’s story has made me feel is that as long as the war lasts … I cannot lead any but an active life, even though it should last for five years … No, it must be some form of active service, and if it implies discomforts, so much the better. I am beginning to feel that to leave nursing now would be a defeat."

In the same vein, a French woman, Marguerite Lesage, wrote in March 1916:

“There are times when I wonder if I’m going to give in to le cafard [depression] … Yes … but having mentally run through this list for the thousandth time, it is enough to think of our soldiers—and in what conditions!—to think, once again, that as long as I can, I must be worthy of them and stay here.”

Unsurprisingly even the most dedicated women workers found their spirits flagging as the war went on, leading to a regime of self-criticism and emotional self-policing. In 1916, now stationed in Malta, Brittain admitted in a letter to her brother:

“One’s personal interest wears one’s patriotism rather threadbare by this time … After all it is a garment one has had to wear for a very long time, so there’s not much wonder if it is beginning to get a little shabby.”

And Julia Stimson, an American volunteer head nurse, wrote in a letter home in June 1917:

"It is so pathetic the way one can lose sight of one’s inspirations if one’s feet are tired, or the way one can forget one is on a crusade if there is no drinking water to be had for half a day, and can be just an ordinary uninspired human female and be fretful and discouraged because you don’t like the tone of voice of a supervisor. It is my job of course to keep before my people the why of our coming and to keep their spirits up."

NEW CONFIDENCE

Despite numerous hardships, the First World War marked an expansion of women’s horizons. Again, it’s worth noting this didn’t result from the granting of women’s suffrage, but rather the reverse, as male politicians and voters were forced to recognize women’s contributions to the war effort, which had already brought new freedoms and greater economic power in its train. Two decades after the war, Robert Roberts, a boy at the time, remembered that the right to vote was granted almost as an afterthought, as even children could see the huge changes in the adult world:

"Whatever war did to women in home, field, service, or factory, it undoubtedly snapped strings that had bound them in so many ways to the Victorian age. Even we, the young, noticed their new self-confidence. Wives in the shop no longer talked about ‘my boss,’ or ‘my master.’ Master had gone to war and Missis ruled the household, or he worked close to her in the factory … earning little more than she did herself. Housewives left their homes and immediate neighborhood more frequently, and with money in their purses went foraging for goods even into the city shops … She discovered her own rights."